Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [1]
The suit had plenty of high-tech augmentation, too. It had a self-contained breather, of course, with enough air for some twelve hours of sealed operation. Also, the air bottles could be changed easily without removing the suit; they could even be swapped out in a vacuum environment without danger to the wearer. There were several sensors built into the suit, including full life support readouts that provided the wearer’s blood pressure, heart rate, and other vital signs. It could detect external radiation, analyze air quality and pressure (or the lack thereof), and provide all the data on a heads-up display (HUD) that projected onto the interior of the visor for easy reading. The data also could be accessed by someone else and was reported on a small LED on the chest. A full-function computer was worn on the wrist, with a link to the HUD and a small screen and keyboard on the unit.
An additional and innovative feature of the suit was the individual mobility system, which allowed the wearer to move through a weightless environment. The IMS consisted of small adjustable nozzles at the hips, shoulders, and feet. By bleeding off a very small amount of the air supply, the wearer could use that released pressure as propulsion. If he began to drift away from his ship, for example, he theoretically could shoot himself right back with a few bursts of air. Of course, an inherent liability of that system was the fact that the more moving around a SEALS did with the IMS, the less air he had to breathe. All SEALS needed to check out with this controlled personal space suit, but Ruiz was not a big fan of the system. Several times during training it had resulted in dangerous leaks that had required a trainee to make a quick return to the station air lock before his emergency backup tank ran out of air. Ten minutes may sound like a lot of time, but not when a SEALS was doing zero-G maneuvers with a faulty IMS.
The military suits were a new design and featured an innate autotourniquet feature at the ankles, knees, elbows, hips, and shoulders. That feature was intended to save the life of the wearer if the suit was breached by attack or other damage in one of the limbs. Though in a vaccum the cost was the loss of the isolated limb, it was hoped that a tight seal would allow the wounded SEALS to reach a pressurized environment while he was still alive.
Chief Ruiz was not entirely sure the thing would work as advertised, but he had seen enough near accidents in training that he was willing to give it a try. Space was full of tiny objects moving at very high speeds, and any one of them could puncture a suit before the wearer even had a clue that he was in danger.
The most important thing about his suit to Master Chief Ruiz and to any other of the few men who currently had the privilege of wearing it was the golden trident he was entitled to wear as his shoulder patch. Ruiz and his platoon commander, Lieutenant Jackson, had been the first to be awarded the new spacefaring SEALS trident. Ensign Sanders, if he completed the final drill regimen, would be the sixteenth.
After Ruiz was satisfied that his own suit checked out, he did the same for the young officer who was the cause of this inconvenient outing.
Ensign Dennis Sanders was a bright-eyed newbie to space, though—like all members of the elite SEALS Teams—he had been through the rigors of BUD/S training in Coronado. Also, he recently had completed the even more extreme program at McMurdo Station on Antarctica. The Alien Environment School was a requirement for any SEALS who aspired to add the newly coveted “S” to the end of his rating, and Ensign